Sweet Machine

Mark Doty's last two award-winning collections of poetry, as well as his acclaimed memoir Heaven's Coast, used the devastation of AIDS as a lens through which to consider questions of loss, love and identity. The poems in Sweet Machine see the world from a new, hard-won perspective: A coming back to life, after so much death, a way of seeing the body's "e;sweet machine"e; not simply as a time bomb, but also as a vibrant, sensual, living thing. These poems are themselves "e;sweet machines"e;lyrical, exuberant and joyousand they mark yet another milestone in the extraordinary career of one of our most distinguished and accomplished poets.